Radiometric and textural fusion of multiresolution Landsat 7 ETM channels for the improvement of visual image interpretation and land cover classification

This paper presents a comparison of the most frequently used method RGB-IHS for fusion of Landsat 7 ETM+ multi-resolution bands with an approach based on introducing some textural coefficients issued from panchromatic band. The commonly used transformation RGB-IHS with the substitution of Intensity component by Panchro band leads to color alteration and changes of statistics of the input RGB components. This may have an influence on image interpretation and results of image classification. An approach based on texture coefficient application on the Intensity component is proposed in order to avoid color changes during process of spatial resolution enhancement. The results of this methodology can be seen on many figures presented in the paper. The images processed in this work were generated by ESA station using ACS processing chain. This algorithm make the coregistration of the pixels of different resolution (15m Panchromatic and 30m multispectral) in “center-to-center” geometry. Such a geometry of coregistration have an impact on texture formulation. An imperfection of bands coregistration was also stated during image processing.